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Scientists in Japan have discovered a way to read someone's dreams while they're sleeping.

A team at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used MRI machines to monitor people while they slept. When the subjects began to dream, the scientists woke them and had them describe what they saw.

They did this 200 times and built a database of all the images that showed up in the dreams.

Then, the same subjects looked at those images on a computer screen while the researchers mapped their brain patterns.

When participants went back into the MRI machine for more sleep, the researchers predicted what they were dreaming about based on their brain patterns. They were accurate 60% of the time -- a percentage that should grow as more data is collected.

"Dreaming is a subjective experience and we quickly forget the contents after awaking," lead author Yukiyasu Kamitani told the journal Science. "Our method ... could provide unambiguous interpretations about spontaneous neural activity."